Chapter 3 - Mara Had Hidden It Before She Left
We went upstairs together.
The old guest room still had cream wallpaper patterned with tiny birds, which was why Olivia called it the bird room.
She pointed behind an antique writing desk.
One piece of wall trim was slightly loose.
Brett had discovered it while hunting for Easter candy earlier that afternoon.
Behind the panel was a narrow cavity.
Empty now except for an old folded note.
My hands shook when I opened it.
Mara’s handwriting.
Dad—
If things go wrong tonight, the recorder stays here. Not in the car. I don’t trust Eleanor anymore.
Please listen before you believe whatever she tells you about why we left.
That one sentence answered something immediately.
Eleanor had searched for the recorder after Mara died because she believed Mara had hidden it somewhere in the house.
But she never found this compartment.
I kept reading.
At the bottom, Mara had written:
Brett finally told us what happens when no one else is here. We can’t leave him alone with her again.
I looked at Brett.
His face went white.
“No,” he whispered.
“What did Mara mean?”
He backed away from me.
“Nothing.”
“Brett.”
“She promised she wouldn’t tell.”
“Tell what?”
He started crying.
Then Olivia, standing beside him, reached for his hand.
That broke something in him.
Brett whispered:
“Grandma has a room downstairs.”
“What room?”
“The little laundry room.”
I waited.
His voice dropped even lower.
“When I cry too much, she puts me inside until I stop.”
I looked back at Mara’s note.
The recorder had not begun as evidence about a car crash.
Mara had been documenting what Eleanor was doing to Brett.
And now I finally understood why Eleanor had been so desperate to recover it.
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But I still didn’t know why that secret followed Mara and Daniel onto the road the night they died.
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